Pope Francis expressed his regret over the fighting on the border between Armenia and Azerbaijan and called for the ceasefire to be respected in order to reach a peace agreement.
The Pope, after praying the Angelus in St. Peter’s Square in the Vatican, expressed his spiritual closeness to the victims of both countries and said that peace can only be achieved when “weapons are silenced and dialogue begins.”
During his recent trip to Kazakhstan, between September 13 and 15, the Pope had already expressed his concern about “new sources of tension in the Caucasus region.”
At the Vatican, after praying the Angelus, the Pope also asked for prayers for the “martyr Ukraine” and appealed for peace in this country and in all corners of the world where there is war.
As for Armenia and Azerbaijan, the two countries accuse each other of sporadic and recurring border attacks.
The clashes, which broke out on September 13, were attributed by the Azerbaijani authorities to a “large-scale provocation” by Armenia and have already left more than 200 dead.
Meanwhile, this Sunday, the president of the United States House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, condemned today in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, Azerbaijan’s “deadly attacks” against Armenian territory.
“On behalf of Congress, we strongly condemn Azerbaijan’s deadly attacks on Armenian territory,” Pelosi said at the joint news conference with Armenian parliament speaker Alen Simonyan.
Armenia and Azerbaijan declared their independence in 1991 and the beginning of the conflict, which has intensified in recent months, has focused on the enclave of Nagorno-Kharabak, a region in Azerbaijani territory, today inhabited almost exclusively by Armenians (Orthodox Christians), who declared independence from Muslim Azerbaijan after a war in the early 1990s that left some 30,000 dead and hundreds of thousands of refugees.
After that war, a ceasefire was signed in 1994 and the mediation of the Minsk Group (Russia, France and the United States), constituted within the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), was accepted, but the skirmishes Armed raids continued to be frequent and involved major clashes in 2018.
Some two years later, in the fall of 2020, Armenia and Azerbaijan fought for six weeks for control of Nagorno-Karabakh during a new war that left 6,500 dead and with a heavy defeat for Armenia, which lost a significant part of the territories it had controlled. . for three decades.
After the signing of an agreement under Russian mediation, Azerbaijan, supported militarily by Turkey, recorded important territorial gains and Moscow sent a peacekeeping force of 2,000 soldiers to the Nagorno-Karabakh region.
Source: TSF
